Welcome to the Jan
Dejnožka Home Page, with philosophy papers and books, reviews of
classical music with a reminiscence of Louis Krasner, and more.
Permission is granted to quote material from unpublished papers on
this site, provided that the papers are cited by author, title, date,
and Web address (URL). Please feel free to contact me at
dejnožka@juno.com.

Preface,
appearing by kind permission of the publisher, Rowman &
Littlefield. From the 2003 reprint. It is for personal use only and
cannot be photocopied or forwarded without permission from the
publisher. Page breaks are different due to software changes.

Chapter
1: Introduction, appearing by kind permission of the publisher,
Rowman & Littlefield. From the 2003 reprint. It is for personal
use only and cannot be photocopied or forwarded without permission
from the publisher. Page breaks are different due to software
changes.

The first
edition (February 1999) sold out. It was reviewed in History
and Philosophy of Logic,
Studia
Logica,
The
Bulletin of Symbolic Logic,
Russell,
and The
Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly.

The second edition
took seventeen years to prepare and is over twice as long. Among
other things, the book is now more fully interdisciplinary. It is
mostly philosophy, but there are now 132 pages on the history of the
concept of logical relevance in evidence law, which I argue is by far
the most likely origin of Russell’s logical theory of
probability, indirectly through John Maynard Keynes’ theory of
probability as degree of logical relevance. Among other things,
Keynes was a member of the Inner Temple, one of the four English
bars; and his work on probability was arguably better researched than
his more famous work in economics.

Unpublished
draft manuscript. October 8, 2007. Subsumes the corporate entity
papers listed below and adds new material on real identity and real
distinction, emergentism, supervenience, mereology, and the
quantification and mathematization of business phenomena in
economics.

The
papers in this section were inspired by members of Living Grace
Ministry (LGM), Korean United Methodist Church (KUMC), Ann Arbor MI,
including Pastor Steve Khang. LGM is primarily a youth ministry from
middle school up to graduate school, though anyone can attend, and I
often do. My views do not reflect those of Pastor Steve, LGM or KUMC.
Since I’m agnostic, my views are very different in some ways,
and the papers are intended for college students in general.

"Philosophies
of." A note for students in other fields who would like to
study the philosophy of their field.

"Personal
Relationships: Emotions and Responsibilities." This is the
only work I have done in what Aristotle would call the practical
science of ethics. All the other philosophy I have done is in what
Aristotle would call theoretical science. Theoretical science is the
study of what is the case, or how things are in the world. Practical
science is the study of how we ought to live in the world. The paper
was inspired by two of Pastor Steve’s sermons in 2015, one on
right and wrong relationships, and the other on kinds of love. Thanks
to Pastor
Steve for inspiring this paper.

“Dummett’s
Backward Road to Frege and to Intuitionism.”
Appearing by kind
permission of Open Court Publishing Company, a division of Carus
Publishing Company, from The
Philosophy of Michael Dummett,
ed. by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, copyright 2007 by The
Library of Living Philosophers in La Salle, Ill.

“Russell’s
Seventeen Private-Language Arguments.”Russell11/1, 11-35, 1991,
appearing by kind permission of the editor. The paper was read at the
Bertrand Russell Society meeting at the Eastern Division Meeting of
the American Philosophical Association in December 1990. Philosophy
of language.

“Zeno’s
Paradoxes and the Cosmological Argument.”International Journal
for Philosophy of Religion25,
65-81, 1989, appearing by kind permission of Springer.
Philosophy of mathematics is used to show a fallacy in three of St.
Thomas Aquinas' five arguments for the existence of God. Adding
infinitesimals will not change the argument, if there is no smallest
infinitesimal.

“Russell’s
Robust Sense of Reality.”Grazer
Philosophische Studien32,
155-64, 1988, appearing by kind permission of the editor. The paper,
Butchvarov’s response and my rejoinder, and Stewart Umphrey’s
response and my rejoinder, were read at the Bertrand Russell Society
meeting at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical
Association on December 28, 1987 in New York City. All five papers
appear in GPS32.

“Is
an Objectively Best Tax Policy Possible?.”written for Kyle Logue’s
tax law course (1994). A discussion of objectivity and the paradoxes
of relativism as they apply to tax policy. This is a reply to a 1992
paper in Tax
Policyby
Douglas A. Kahn and Jeffrey S. Lehman.

“Corporate
Entity: A Legal and Ontological Study.”written for Joseph Vining
for independent research credit (1996), after taking his enterprise
organization course. There is a wide discussion of issues, but the
main topic is the reality of human groups and institutions. Subsumed
into my
corporate entitybook
as parts one and two.

“Corporate
Entity: Vagueness, Artifice, and Reality.”a
sequel to my “Corporate Entity: A Legal and Ontological Study.”
July 6, 2005; updated September 26, 2005. An original discussion of
vagueness, and the only sustained criticism of Russell’s
definition of “vague” I know of. Subsumed into mycorporate
entitybook
as part 3, sects. 1-9.

Whether this or that,
or whether they both alike shall be good.” Ecclesiastes 11:
4-6.

The
New Testament

“Foxes have
holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not
where to lay his head.” Matthew 8: 20.

“The wind
bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but
canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every
one that is born of the Spirit.” John 3: 8.

The
Dhammapada

“92. Who can
trace the path of those who know the right food of life and,
rejecting over-abundance, soar in the sky of liberation, the infinite
Void without beginning? Their course is as hard to follow as that of
the birds in the air.

“384. When
beyond meditation and contemplation a Brahmin has reached the other
shore, then he attains the supreme vision and all his fetters are
broken.

“385. He for
whom there is neither this nor the further shore, nor both, who,
beyond all fear, is free―him I call a Brahmin.

“416. He who
wanders without a home in this world, leaving behind the feverish
thirst for the world, and the fever never returns―him I call a
Brahmin.”

Trans. by Juan
Mascaró. New York: Penguin, 1980.

Svetasvatara
Upanishad

“Two birds,
inseparable friends, cling to the same tree. One of them eats the
sweet fruit, the other looks on without eating....He is beyond all
the forms of the tree (of the world) and of time, he is the
other....He is the one bird in the midst of the world; he is also
(like) the fire (of the sun) that has set in the ocean.”